Fic: The Outer Limits
Sep. 15th, 2008 05:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tanaquiljallTitle: The Outer Limits
Author: TanaquiSGA
Rating: General
Characters: John Sheppard and Rodney McKay, plus other members of the Season 5 Atlantis expedition
Genre: Gen
Spoilers: Season 5
Warnings: none
Word count: 1875
Summary: Written for the The Oscar Wilde Appreciation Fanfiction Challenge and the quotation: "I can resist everything except temptation." Irritated by Woolsey's attitude, John and Rodney can't resist the temptation to pull a practical joke.
Author's Note: My thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sgafan for helping me nail down the plot on this one, and to sgafan, elena_tiriel and scribblesinink for beta reading.
***
"How long has he been on Atlantis?" John nodded at Richard Woolsey's back as the new head of the Atlantis expedition strode away from the conference room.
"Hmm?" Rodney looked up from tapping something into his datapad. "About six weeks, I think."
"You'd have thought he'd at least have got a handle on where the most important stuff is by now. I swear, if he says," John adopted a constipated expression and mimicked Woolsey's precise diction, "'Remind me again, where is that?' one more time, I'm going to do something that'll get me court-martialed."
Rodney, still poking at his datapad, suggested in absent tones, "We could always arrange a transporter 'malfunction' to strand him on one of the outer piers. Make him walk back...."
There was a moment of tense silence before Rodney looked up and locked gazes with John.
"We shouldn't...," John said slowly, trying to remind himself that he was the ranking military officer and that they were in a hostile galaxy and that Woolsey wasn't so bad really. Trying to be responsible....
"But we could," Rodney repeated carefully. John could tell he was already seeing in his mind how to cross-wire crystals and create a lockdown for a single transporter and create a localized radio blackout. Trying not to get excited at the technical challenge....
Both of them jumped at a crackle of static over their radios, closely followed by Woolsey's clipped tones: "Doctor McKay? Remind me again, where is the botany lab?"
***
John peered cautiously round the bulkhead at the transporter doors and, beyond them, the entrance to the gateroom. Woolsey almost always chose this transporter to get to the mess hall, and could be relied on to leave his office at eighteen hundred hours precisely providing there was no crisis actually threatening the safety of City. It would be just their luck if today he decided to deviate from his routine and....
But no, here he came. John tapped his radio and murmured "Rodney? Standby.... No, wait!" A couple of scientists whose names John couldn't remember were stepping into the transporter. Woolsey hurried forward and raised a hand as if to ask them to hold the elevator, but one of them had already tapped the control screen, and the doors swished closed. Woolsey sagged visibly, and resumed his stiff walk towards the transporter. John tapped his headset again. "Now, Rodney."
Watching the doors slide closed behind Woolsey, John smiled in grim satisfaction. Slipping his radio from his ear, he headed off to his quarters to pick up a couple of beers with which he and Rodney could toast the success of their practical joke.
***
"Colonel Sheppard, Doctor McKay to the control room!" The summons crackled in John's ear. He shifted the beer bottles to his other hand and tapped his headset.
"Sheppard here. What's going on?"
"Colonel," Chuck's voice sounded strained. "We seem to be having a major malfunction with the transporter system."
Uh-oh. John felt a cold trickle of worry and discomfort run down his back. Breaking into a rapid trot, he set off up the corridor.
When he reached the control room, he found half a dozen techs clustered round one of the control desks with worried expressions. Chuck looked relieved as he spotted John jogging up the stairs. "Colonel!" He nodded at a display showing the internal lifesign detectors. "People are reporting in from all over the city that they've been transported to the wrong locations. When they try to get back to where they started from or go somewhere else, either the transporter is locked down or they end up being transported to somewhere else equally random."
John looked around at the group of technicians. Competent operatives, but they were all fairly low-level. None of them were capable of fixing more than the most basic things. And where was Rodney? Hadn't he been summoned to the control room as well. "Where's Doctor McKay?"
Chuck shrugged. "We've been trying to contact him, but he hasn't replied."
John tapped his radio. "Rodney?" He waited, but there was nothing but static. "Rodney? Please respond!"
***
Rodney woke to find himself wedged uncomfortably on the floor of a transporter. Sitting up, he grasped his head, which was pounding uncomfortably, and groaned.
What am I doing out here? He searched his memory but the immediate past eluded him. Must be a concussion. Or maybe, because this was Pegasus, some alien brain-sucking monster. Either way, he should get to the infirmary and get checked out.
He squinted up at the transporter display and worked out he was down by the botany labs. Was I visiting Katie? No, wait, she's not on Atlantis any more.... She's.... Pressing one hand to his forehead, he stretched up awkwardly with the other and tapped the location of the central tower.
***
John hurried along the corridor to where he knew Rodney had been messing with the transporter crystals. He'd informed Woolsey that he thought Rodney was in the central tower and he could track him down. Meanwhile, Chuck was issuing a Citywide alert telling everyone to stay put and not use the transporters while they tried to sort things out. And if he couldn't find Rodney...? Radek, whom John suspected was the only other person who had a snowball's chance in hell of fixing this thing, was stuck out by one of the underwater jumper bays with Doctor Simpson. He'd radioed in while John was jogging down five flights of stairs to say they tried getting back to the main tower and just ended up even further away.
Communication was made all the more difficult by frequent interruptions from Woolsey, who had been the first person to report the malfunction. From Chuck's manner, John gathered he hadn't stopped bleating since. He'd ended up at the far end of the South-West pier, and the transporter there had gone dead as soon as he'd arrived, so at least something had worked out like it was supposed to, but–.
John turned off into the area where Rodney had been working. A crystal cabinet still stood open, half a dozen crystals scattered on the floor around it. The smell of something burning hung in the air, and there was no sign of Rodney.
Oh crap!
***
When the door slid open, Rodney began to crawl out into the corridor. The infirmary was left. No, right. No.... not even in this tower. He could see Atlantis's control chair through an archway leading to a chamber just down the corridor to the left.
Huh. He looked back at the transporter. Must've hit the wrong part of the screen? He crawled back into the transporter, hauled himself to his knees in front of the display and carefully pressed the location for the central tower.
This time, the doors opened on to one of the storage areas out by the landing pad on the East Pier. Rodney rubbed a hand across his eyes. Memory was returning. Of switching control crystals. Of some kind of energy shock just as he had his fingers around the contacts of a control crystal to pull it out.
Oh crap!
***
John tapped his headset. "Sheppard here. Doctor McKay isn't where I thought he might be. But, ah, I think he was here...." John crouched down and peered at the handful of crystals, wondering if he could fix things by stuffing them back into slots at random. Probably not.
"I see." Woolsey's clipped tones echoed in his ear. "I've been wondering, Colonel. What made you think Doctor McKay might be there?"
"I, uh...." John grimaced at Woolsey's question. For someone who couldn't find his way fifty feet down the hall, Woolsey could be remarkably sharp. "I asked Doctor McKay to look into making some modifications to the transporters. I, uh, thought maybe we could make it easier to move troops around the city in the event of another attack." John gritted his teeth, hoping Woolsey would buy the lie.
"I see." Again there was that faint air of disbelief in Woolsey's voice. "And was this change authorized, Colonel?"
"No, sir." John climbed back to his feet, leaving the crystals where they were.
Woolsey's weary sigh came over the radio loud and clear. "Remind me, Colonel, that we need to have another little talk about proper protocol when we next meet. Now... if there's no one available to fix the transporters, you'll have to talk me back to the central control tower while we hunt down Doctor McKay. I'm at the far end of one of the piers...."
***
Discovering his radio had got fried by the energy discharge was just the sprinkles on the frosting for Rodney. His head still pounded and his back ached from where he'd passed out in the transporter. He would have sat down and waited for someone to rescue him if he had more than one Powerbar with him, and if he hadn't recalled that probably the only other person who could fix the transporters was Radek, and he'd be damned if he was going to let Doctor Fumbles McStupid dig him out of the hole he'd got himself into.
Finishing the Powerbar, he hauled himself to his feet and began the long trek back to the central tower....
***
Having an Iratus bug clamped to his neck would have been preferable to listening to Woolsey's bleating for the entire time it took John to take a jumper down to the underwater jumper bay, pick up Zelenka and Simpson, bring them back, and have Zelenka fix the transporters. Especially as he still didn't know where Rodney had got to, or how badly hurt he might be given the less than healthy state of the control crystals.
Radek – whose equal concern for Rodney was evident in the way he'd set to work with only one sarcastic remark thrown in his boss's direction – had proffered various theories as he worked, each less reassuring than the last.
Leaning against the wall, John tried not to bug Radek with too many questions as he guided Woolsey the final mile back to the center of the City....
***
"Do you have to do that?" John paused from trying to assign logical military-style designations to every hall, stairway, room, closet and deck on Atlantis so that any new member of staff could find his way from one place to another simply by knowing the room numbers. Of course, Atlantis was the size of Manhattan and far from logical, so the task was both tedious and almost impossible. John suspected Woolsey knew that when he assigned John and Rodney to do it.
Rodney had his bare foot up on the conference room table and was massaging his toes. "Yes." He shot John an annoyed glare. "I had to walk all the way back from the East Pier, you know."
"Well I had to give Woolsey step-by-step directions all the way back from the South-West Pier. And he still managed to get lost three times."
"Remind me never to let you talk me into playing a practical joke again." Rodney started on the other foot.
"Me talk you into it?" John raised an eyebrow.
Rodney opened his mouth to argue, but was cut off by Woolsey's voice on the radio.
"Doctor McKay to Mr. Woolsey's quarters. I seem to be having some problems working the environmental control."
John and Rodney looked at each other.
"We shouldn't...," John said slowly
Rodney nodded. "But we could...."
Author: TanaquiSGA
Rating: General
Characters: John Sheppard and Rodney McKay, plus other members of the Season 5 Atlantis expedition
Genre: Gen
Spoilers: Season 5
Warnings: none
Word count: 1875
Summary: Written for the The Oscar Wilde Appreciation Fanfiction Challenge and the quotation: "I can resist everything except temptation." Irritated by Woolsey's attitude, John and Rodney can't resist the temptation to pull a practical joke.
Author's Note: My thanks to
sgafan for helping me nail down the plot on this one, and to sgafan, elena_tiriel and scribblesinink for beta reading. "How long has he been on Atlantis?" John nodded at Richard Woolsey's back as the new head of the Atlantis expedition strode away from the conference room.
"Hmm?" Rodney looked up from tapping something into his datapad. "About six weeks, I think."
"You'd have thought he'd at least have got a handle on where the most important stuff is by now. I swear, if he says," John adopted a constipated expression and mimicked Woolsey's precise diction, "'Remind me again, where is that?' one more time, I'm going to do something that'll get me court-martialed."
Rodney, still poking at his datapad, suggested in absent tones, "We could always arrange a transporter 'malfunction' to strand him on one of the outer piers. Make him walk back...."
There was a moment of tense silence before Rodney looked up and locked gazes with John.
"We shouldn't...," John said slowly, trying to remind himself that he was the ranking military officer and that they were in a hostile galaxy and that Woolsey wasn't so bad really. Trying to be responsible....
"But we could," Rodney repeated carefully. John could tell he was already seeing in his mind how to cross-wire crystals and create a lockdown for a single transporter and create a localized radio blackout. Trying not to get excited at the technical challenge....
Both of them jumped at a crackle of static over their radios, closely followed by Woolsey's clipped tones: "Doctor McKay? Remind me again, where is the botany lab?"
John peered cautiously round the bulkhead at the transporter doors and, beyond them, the entrance to the gateroom. Woolsey almost always chose this transporter to get to the mess hall, and could be relied on to leave his office at eighteen hundred hours precisely providing there was no crisis actually threatening the safety of City. It would be just their luck if today he decided to deviate from his routine and....
But no, here he came. John tapped his radio and murmured "Rodney? Standby.... No, wait!" A couple of scientists whose names John couldn't remember were stepping into the transporter. Woolsey hurried forward and raised a hand as if to ask them to hold the elevator, but one of them had already tapped the control screen, and the doors swished closed. Woolsey sagged visibly, and resumed his stiff walk towards the transporter. John tapped his headset again. "Now, Rodney."
Watching the doors slide closed behind Woolsey, John smiled in grim satisfaction. Slipping his radio from his ear, he headed off to his quarters to pick up a couple of beers with which he and Rodney could toast the success of their practical joke.
"Colonel Sheppard, Doctor McKay to the control room!" The summons crackled in John's ear. He shifted the beer bottles to his other hand and tapped his headset.
"Sheppard here. What's going on?"
"Colonel," Chuck's voice sounded strained. "We seem to be having a major malfunction with the transporter system."
Uh-oh. John felt a cold trickle of worry and discomfort run down his back. Breaking into a rapid trot, he set off up the corridor.
When he reached the control room, he found half a dozen techs clustered round one of the control desks with worried expressions. Chuck looked relieved as he spotted John jogging up the stairs. "Colonel!" He nodded at a display showing the internal lifesign detectors. "People are reporting in from all over the city that they've been transported to the wrong locations. When they try to get back to where they started from or go somewhere else, either the transporter is locked down or they end up being transported to somewhere else equally random."
John looked around at the group of technicians. Competent operatives, but they were all fairly low-level. None of them were capable of fixing more than the most basic things. And where was Rodney? Hadn't he been summoned to the control room as well. "Where's Doctor McKay?"
Chuck shrugged. "We've been trying to contact him, but he hasn't replied."
John tapped his radio. "Rodney?" He waited, but there was nothing but static. "Rodney? Please respond!"
Rodney woke to find himself wedged uncomfortably on the floor of a transporter. Sitting up, he grasped his head, which was pounding uncomfortably, and groaned.
What am I doing out here? He searched his memory but the immediate past eluded him. Must be a concussion. Or maybe, because this was Pegasus, some alien brain-sucking monster. Either way, he should get to the infirmary and get checked out.
He squinted up at the transporter display and worked out he was down by the botany labs. Was I visiting Katie? No, wait, she's not on Atlantis any more.... She's.... Pressing one hand to his forehead, he stretched up awkwardly with the other and tapped the location of the central tower.
John hurried along the corridor to where he knew Rodney had been messing with the transporter crystals. He'd informed Woolsey that he thought Rodney was in the central tower and he could track him down. Meanwhile, Chuck was issuing a Citywide alert telling everyone to stay put and not use the transporters while they tried to sort things out. And if he couldn't find Rodney...? Radek, whom John suspected was the only other person who had a snowball's chance in hell of fixing this thing, was stuck out by one of the underwater jumper bays with Doctor Simpson. He'd radioed in while John was jogging down five flights of stairs to say they tried getting back to the main tower and just ended up even further away.
Communication was made all the more difficult by frequent interruptions from Woolsey, who had been the first person to report the malfunction. From Chuck's manner, John gathered he hadn't stopped bleating since. He'd ended up at the far end of the South-West pier, and the transporter there had gone dead as soon as he'd arrived, so at least something had worked out like it was supposed to, but–.
John turned off into the area where Rodney had been working. A crystal cabinet still stood open, half a dozen crystals scattered on the floor around it. The smell of something burning hung in the air, and there was no sign of Rodney.
Oh crap!
When the door slid open, Rodney began to crawl out into the corridor. The infirmary was left. No, right. No.... not even in this tower. He could see Atlantis's control chair through an archway leading to a chamber just down the corridor to the left.
Huh. He looked back at the transporter. Must've hit the wrong part of the screen? He crawled back into the transporter, hauled himself to his knees in front of the display and carefully pressed the location for the central tower.
This time, the doors opened on to one of the storage areas out by the landing pad on the East Pier. Rodney rubbed a hand across his eyes. Memory was returning. Of switching control crystals. Of some kind of energy shock just as he had his fingers around the contacts of a control crystal to pull it out.
Oh crap!
John tapped his headset. "Sheppard here. Doctor McKay isn't where I thought he might be. But, ah, I think he was here...." John crouched down and peered at the handful of crystals, wondering if he could fix things by stuffing them back into slots at random. Probably not.
"I see." Woolsey's clipped tones echoed in his ear. "I've been wondering, Colonel. What made you think Doctor McKay might be there?"
"I, uh...." John grimaced at Woolsey's question. For someone who couldn't find his way fifty feet down the hall, Woolsey could be remarkably sharp. "I asked Doctor McKay to look into making some modifications to the transporters. I, uh, thought maybe we could make it easier to move troops around the city in the event of another attack." John gritted his teeth, hoping Woolsey would buy the lie.
"I see." Again there was that faint air of disbelief in Woolsey's voice. "And was this change authorized, Colonel?"
"No, sir." John climbed back to his feet, leaving the crystals where they were.
Woolsey's weary sigh came over the radio loud and clear. "Remind me, Colonel, that we need to have another little talk about proper protocol when we next meet. Now... if there's no one available to fix the transporters, you'll have to talk me back to the central control tower while we hunt down Doctor McKay. I'm at the far end of one of the piers...."
Discovering his radio had got fried by the energy discharge was just the sprinkles on the frosting for Rodney. His head still pounded and his back ached from where he'd passed out in the transporter. He would have sat down and waited for someone to rescue him if he had more than one Powerbar with him, and if he hadn't recalled that probably the only other person who could fix the transporters was Radek, and he'd be damned if he was going to let Doctor Fumbles McStupid dig him out of the hole he'd got himself into.
Finishing the Powerbar, he hauled himself to his feet and began the long trek back to the central tower....
Having an Iratus bug clamped to his neck would have been preferable to listening to Woolsey's bleating for the entire time it took John to take a jumper down to the underwater jumper bay, pick up Zelenka and Simpson, bring them back, and have Zelenka fix the transporters. Especially as he still didn't know where Rodney had got to, or how badly hurt he might be given the less than healthy state of the control crystals.
Radek – whose equal concern for Rodney was evident in the way he'd set to work with only one sarcastic remark thrown in his boss's direction – had proffered various theories as he worked, each less reassuring than the last.
Leaning against the wall, John tried not to bug Radek with too many questions as he guided Woolsey the final mile back to the center of the City....
"Do you have to do that?" John paused from trying to assign logical military-style designations to every hall, stairway, room, closet and deck on Atlantis so that any new member of staff could find his way from one place to another simply by knowing the room numbers. Of course, Atlantis was the size of Manhattan and far from logical, so the task was both tedious and almost impossible. John suspected Woolsey knew that when he assigned John and Rodney to do it.
Rodney had his bare foot up on the conference room table and was massaging his toes. "Yes." He shot John an annoyed glare. "I had to walk all the way back from the East Pier, you know."
"Well I had to give Woolsey step-by-step directions all the way back from the South-West Pier. And he still managed to get lost three times."
"Remind me never to let you talk me into playing a practical joke again." Rodney started on the other foot.
"Me talk you into it?" John raised an eyebrow.
Rodney opened his mouth to argue, but was cut off by Woolsey's voice on the radio.
"Doctor McKay to Mr. Woolsey's quarters. I seem to be having some problems working the environmental control."
John and Rodney looked at each other.
"We shouldn't...," John said slowly
Rodney nodded. "But we could...."
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-09-15 07:30 pm (UTC)(and I have the *perfect* icon for it. Is it weird that that makes me like a story more?)
no subject
Date: 2008-09-15 08:06 pm (UTC)Also, to the OP: what they said. *nodnod*
no subject
Date: 2008-09-16 02:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-16 02:14 pm (UTC)Glad you enjoyed the story. I also like Woolsey very much as well, but in part precisely because there's a little friction with Team Sheppard. It was fun to play on that in a light-hearted way.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-15 09:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-16 02:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-15 10:58 pm (UTC)Very cute, *S*
no subject
Date: 2008-09-16 02:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-15 11:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-16 02:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-16 04:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-16 02:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-19 08:51 am (UTC)LOL
no subject
Date: 2008-09-21 10:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-19 05:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-21 10:12 pm (UTC)And *eep* your icon! Very nice. (Does that mean there's more Jack/Elizabeth fic in the works? *looks hopeful*)
no subject
Date: 2008-09-22 03:14 pm (UTC)The short answer is yes :) I seem to have not got back into the writing thing, at the moment, but I have bits of one going round my head continuing from when we last saw Elizabeth.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-24 12:16 am (UTC)Yay! But no pressure - just know that you'll have an avid reader if you do decide to go back to them. *g*
no subject
Date: 2008-09-24 09:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-23 04:42 am (UTC)Enjoyable fic.
DragonLady
no subject
Date: 2008-09-24 12:16 am (UTC)